TechTicker
educational technology, eLearning & emerging technology

I must admit that my attendance of and participation in the SANTEC web seminar was dreadful the last few days of the event. From the sound of things I wasn’t alone in this respect either. According to their most recent blog post:

“What happened in this seminar when the comments on this blog slowed down and stopped? Was it the mistaken message on the SANTEC list that the seminar was over? Was it simply that the workshop and seminar genres don’t mix? Or that a workshop that works well with live face to face interaction in a lab would transfer online better with some form of synchronous interaction?”

From my own personal experiences the asynchronous, web based nature of the event was initially an extremely facilitating factor, however after a few days it became the means that begot neglect.

This was due to several factors I think, not the least of which being the absence of a more pronounced human component (the synchronous interaction that was mentioned in the post), coupled the ability of the familiar to distract from the at times isolating feeling of asynchronous textual discussion.

With face to face seminars you leave your office and go to a different location. Even if it’s on the same campus you’re away from your office and the familiar environment, so there are not the typical distractions and ever-present nagging demands that must be done during the day. Significantly too is the presence of people and real-time interaction and collaboration. In this environment it’s that much easier to focus on the task at hand, because it’s right in front of you and talking to you.

The structure of the SANTEC seminar on the other hand, while giving each participant the enormous ability to consider, reconsider, edit and respond in their own time left them within the realm of the physically familiar. So when an alternative and unrelated task presented itself in the flesh, it became that much easier to “come back to that blog post later”.

That’s not to say that web-based seminars are doomed to failure, merely that their structure will need to incorporate activities, aims and objectives that account for the human component that is so integral in face-to-face seminars.

As a few examples, I offer the following activities or elements for consideration and/or discussion:

• Integration and introduction of some form of group work with a deliverable and pre-defined objective
• The necessity to interact not just textually, but via audio and even video chat tools
• An educational or explanatory component at the beginning to establish a base knowledge level
• A means of linking and/or summarising multiple concurrent discussions inherent to the relatively scattered and organic nature of the technology
• More thoughts to come…

With this said, I firmly believe that the seminar’s structure has merit, however I believe equally firmly that future participants will need to prepare themselves for a much different seminar environment than they may be used to in the past. Distraction and procrastination are Public Enemy Number One in the online realm, and I definitely fell prey to them both.

More thoughts on SANTEC as time permits…

Google recently announced an increase in the maximum file attachment size from 10 megabytes to 20, saying:

“Now you can start sharing more of those home videos, large presentations and files you just can’t seem to get smaller. We have doubled the allowable attachment size to 20 MB to make your Gmail space even more useful.”

With most email providers filtering out messages that are 10 megs and over with caps on incoming file sizes the relative benefit of this increase is likely to be minor unless both parties are Gmail users.

…or perhaps that’s the aim.